Q&A: Sin Nombre Director Cary Fukunaga on the Path to Auteurdom

Cary Fukunaga, one of Hollywood’s most promising directors, took no short cuts. At 32, he has three degrees—one in history from U.C. Santa Cruz; one from a political institute in Grenoble, France; and one from the N.Y.U.'s graduate film program. In fact, the only nepotistic boost he’ll admit to receiving is the fact that he had a friend whose journalist father knew a professor who knew the head of Mexican state security, who in turn granted Fukunaga access to incarcerated gang members. It was through interviews with those prisoners—as well as his experience joining dozens of other stowaways atop freight trains winding their way to the U.S. border—that Fukunaga developed his script for Sin Nombre, one of our favorite movies of last year.

Sin Nombre, which went on to win the best directing and cinematography awards at Sundance (the base camp of auteurdom), earned Fukunaga rave reviews as well as a first-look deal with Focus Features. Careful not to repeat himself, Fukunaga, who is half Swedish and half Japanese, made sure to follow Sin Nombre up with a very different project: an umpteenth adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, starring Michael Fassbender and Alice in Wonderland’s Mia Wasikowska.

Sin Nombre was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards, including best director and best feature. Awaiting tonight’s ceremony—where he hopes to run into Waskowska—Fukunaga took the time to discuss his education in film, his career plan, and his dream project: a musical take on a Babylonian legend. Seriously.

Sin Nombre was a very personal project from beginning to end. By following that with an adaptation of Jane Eyre, are you abandoning the idea of always being a writer-director?

I did wonder about that. I think there’s a part of you, especially during your first film, that wonders if you’re going to be someone who just writes his own projects. And I wish I wrote that fast, but considering the amount of movies I want to make in the finite time I have to make films, I wont be able to write all my films.

I eventually want to do writing on all the films, but not necessarily to be the writer. Writing is a painful, painful thing, it really is.

What do you find most painful about it?

It’s lonely and you suffer a lot. I’m never more miserable than when I write, and never more happy than having finished and having it sitting in front of me. I have a couple projects I need to write, coming up soon. You know once you start doing it that it’s going to be fine, but that time before you decide you’re going to commit and sit down and start writing...

All of a sudden cleaning your desk and alphabetizing your books sounds a lot more urgent.

Yeah, you’ve got to turn off the Internet, can’t hang out with your friends&hellip; Winter is actually a good time to do it because it’s miserable outside.

Can you describe your writing process?

I binge write, basically. I do a lot of prep, research, setup. I’ll have a pretty detailed outline. Sort of like a beat outline. And then I’ll add little notes and dialogue ideas and I’ll just create a 20-page document. Then I’ll sit down, and I’ll decide I’m going to write for ten days straight and I’ll just write ten pages a day and then each day I’ll go over the previous pages that I’ve written and then add ten more pages, not trying to make it perfect, just getting out the ten pages that I need to write for those beats. So by the time I got to the end, those first pages have been worked ten times and everything else will be worked over as we get further along in the process.

So you’re saying the beginnings of your movies are a lot better than the ends?

Well, yeah, maybe. Unless I have a really great idea for the end.

Do you write on Word or on Final Draft?

Final Draft. But I write all my outline thoughts in Word. I’m pen-palling with a friend in Australia, and I’ve been trying to write longhand. I’ve got no more muscle for it. As I wrote, my hand started cramping after like two pages.

Are there any directors or writer-directors that you’d want to model your career after?

I don’t know if there’s any one director.

You must have had an idol when you were a kid.

I’ll definitely say that, before film school, I didn’t have much of a film-history background. I didn’t know much about classic cinema. In fact, before my interview with N.Y.U., I had to watch a few old films just to get an idea of what classic cinema was, because those black-and-white films I was watching with my mom were like popcorn cinema. It definitely wasn’t, like, German neo-realism or something. We had to watch 50 films to go to N.Y.U., and I watched a bunch of silent films then. And I didn’t decide I was going to go until about a month before classes started. Netflix had just come out so I was Netflix-ing all these movies, and watching three movies a day, and watching the silent films on fast-forward to get through it as fast a possible&hellip;

They already walked pretty fast in the silent era, if those films are to be believed.

I know! Some of those D.W. Griffith films were like three-and-a-half hours long, but if you just fast-forward it, suddenly it’s only 45 minutes. And it’s hard to watch so many movies at once, but I did really learn to appreciate classic cinema after that. You start to see where contemporary directors are stealing-slash-borrowing from the past. But in terms of careers I look up to&hellip; You asked me earlier about writing and not writing, I think definitely I want to be that director who hopefully gets to make a lot of films, and if I do, most likely I won’t be writing them all. um, I’d rather go for having a large um, volume of films by the time I’m dead, then like five auteur films.

So Terrence Malick’s out, I guess?

Right, although I love Terrence Malick's films. Though he’s starting to make more films now these days. But I think Alfonso Cuar&oacute;n and Ang Lee have had pretty varied careers. The films they make are their films, but you can’t say they’re always doing a certain genre. Like them, I wouldn’t want to be genre-specific. I like the idea of like trying new things, otherwise it’s not that interesting. So, I guess that explains the jump from Mexico to Victorian England.

Cuar&oacute;n directed a Harry Potter movie. Is it safe to assume you’re doing the next one?

(Laughs.) Right. I do have some ideas for my next film, which I’m pitching to Universal Studios soon, that are just as different. And I was writing a musical for Focus before this.

Are you serious?

Yeah, but it’s presumptuous to think that I could get a musical done in a year.

Are you a fan of musicals?

No, not really, but I love music. I don’t like "musical music" so much.

What’s it about?

It’s about a boy and a girl who are in love with each other, and they both live in parallel dimensions. Her world is like our world and his world is like our world, but they don’t coincide, and the way they’re able to see and hear each other is via singing. But they can’t touch each other, so that’s like the worst thing. So it’s a nod to Pyramus and Thisbe. Do you know the story? [No.] It’s a Babylonian tale about the most beautiful boy in town and the most beautiful girl in town, who are neighbors but their parents hate each other and they can't see each other. But there’s a hole in the wall through which they could talk to each other but they couldn’t touch each other.

But what about&hellip;

Yeah, so this was before people knew the concept of glory holes.

Gotcha.

It’s a tragic story: they decided to meet one night, outside of town, under this Mulberry tree. There’s a tigress out there and Thisbe runs away because she’s afraid of the tigress, but she drops her shawl. The tigress comes up to the shawl and starts eating it, and Pyramus thinks she’s been eaten and he thinks it’s his fault for not being there first, as a man should, to make sure everything was safe before she came and saw him. And so he takes his own life, and then Thisbe comes back&hellip;

Wait, this is all sounding very familiar now.

Right, well, so this is basically—Shakespeare basically got Romeo and Juliet from this tale.

How are you feeling about the Independent Spirit Awards?

I’m really excited. I hope something happens, because Adriano Goldman, my cinematographer, is nominated, and my producer is nominated. Mia Wasikowska [who is cast as Jane Eyre in Fukunaga’s adaptation] is going to be there because she’s nominated for another film.I have two other friends, who each have their films nominated there, plus their cinematographers. So it going to be a bunch of old friends, hanging out. In the independent world, it’s a good, fun awards ceremony.